The guys over at Kauai Fungi were kind enough to donate 2 petri dishes of Pleurotus djamor, the Pink Oyster Mushroom, to us here at Amateur Mycology for the Amateur Mycology Culture Library. Saturday they arrived in the mail! We quickly made sure they were not sitting in the mail box too long, as it is still very cold here in Colorado, and Pleurotus djamor is known to have mycelial die-back if temperatures go below 60 degrees F. This also brings up the question as to how you keep these tropical mushrooms in cold storage. We will ask Kauai Fungi this week and give you all an update.

If you look at the picture above, you will see a close up of the mycelial growth of the Pink Oyster, which to our surprise, was bright pink!! Dana said it looks like Pepto, and I would have to entirely agree. Interestingly, when I took pieces of it out in the laboratory and transfered them into test tubes, I noticed that it stains the agar that same bright pink! What an interesting fungi.

Now for those of you who do not know what this mushroom is for, James and I went to the Denver Botanic Gardens and spoke to the curator of the tropical plants at the gardens, who is in charge of the plants inside the glass conservatory/ atrium that houses most of the tropical plant specimens. He voiced interest in growing fungi inside this tropical environment, and James and I jumped on the project the first chance we got. When we met and talked about the project, and he explained how he would like tropical species of mushrooms if they were to be displayed inside the conservatory, and lucky for us we already had connections to Kauai Fungi in Hawaii. Despite his enthusiastic response to the idea, the Pink Oyster will not be displayed inside the DBG’s conservatory using our techniques. However, we have other botanic gardens who are interested. We are also developing other species of mushroom for display, but more research is needed.  Check back soon for more information!

Our trip was a blast. It was very nice to be looking for mushrooms so early in the year compared to what we are used to out here in Colorado. However, the drought conditions in Texas made searching for them a little more difficult than in years previous. We learned that last year’s Morel season was the best they had seen in 15 years. Had we known this, we would have probably waited to go out to Texas until a different year to look for Morels specifically. So we switched gears and searched for city mushrooms in heavily watered areas. This technique gave us some good success. We found quite a few different genera most all a little past their prime, but there were a good handful of edible and living samples that we brought back and cultured on Thursday of this week. I will give you a better summary of the mushrooms we found in the next article.

If you would like to see some of the samples of fungi that were found in Texas last week, make sure you attend the Colorado Mycological Society meeting this coming Monday at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The meetings start at 7pm and usually wrap up around 9pm. We will be displaying dried samples of Ganoderma, Pleurotus, various Polypores, Earthstars, Lentinus, Lactarius and a few others that were found last week in Austin, Athens, White Oak, and San Antonio. We will also be displaying a few fruiting grain jars of Pleurotus columbinus as well as bags of oyster mushroom spawn made with green techniques.

On another note, our Pink Oyster mushrooms came from Kauai Fungi yesterday for our project that we are doing at a few botanic gardens. Kauai Fungi was kind enough to donate a spawn bag of their tropical variety of Pleurotus djamor to our project. We plan to do a fungi demonstration inside a tropical conservatory. We also just acquired a culture of the Golden Oyster, Pleurotus cornucopiae. I think the two fruiting together would be stunning.

The bags of oyster spawn we made before we left for Texas are starting to form primordia! (primordia are baby mushrooms) This means they are already eaten through their substrate and are starting to want to fruit! We expanded them 12 days ago, so this says to me that our ‘Cold Pasteurization’ concept works just as fast as standard pasteurization methods! Stay tuned for a detailed description of this project, from start to finish, within the month! The bags of spawn are destined for Jackie’s Farm for expansion and fruiting, and if you take one of our seminars this summer, coming to a backyard near you!